Today the Prism Composite Application Guidance for WPF team (Gosh, what a name!) published the first release candidate.

The Composite Application Guidance for WPF is designed to help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) client applications. This guidance will help you design and build flexible composite WPF client applications – applications that use loosely coupled, independently evolvable pieces that work together within the overall application.

The release description states that the final release will be on MSDN within a couple of weeks.

Hier mal mein Versuch den Begriff "ALT.NET" in einer Xing-Gruppe
(https://www.xing.com/app/forum?op=showarticles;id=7137858;articleid=7137858#7137858) zu beschreiben:

"Soweit ich das überblicken kann wurde dieser Begriff erstmals von David Laribee erwähnt und umschrieben:
http://laribee.com/blog/2007/04/10/altnet/

ALT.NET beschreibt eine bestimmte Einstellung des Entwicklers. Dieser zeichnet sich dadurch aus, dass er nicht bereit ist, sich Mainstream-konform zu verhalten. Vielmehr steuert er dagegen und ist ständig und aktiv auf der Suche nach besseren Wegen und Tools, um Ziele zu erreichen. Mit Wegen und Tools sind hier sämtliche Mittel der Softwareentwicklung gemeint. Das sind neben bspw. Entwicklungsumgebungen und Entwicklertools auch Programmiermethoden und Paradigmen. Ich würde sage, das Ganze hat mit Microsoft direkt nichts zu tun.
Obwohl sich viele Erkenntnisse der ALT.NET-Community gegen Microsoft und dessen vorgegebenen und empfohlenen Wegen richten. Das liegt aber eigentlich nur daran, dass Microsoft den größten  Einfluss auf die Entwicklergemeinschaft hat und somit den Mainstream definiert. Der brave .NET-Entwickler trabt da natürlich einfach hinterher, ohne sich zu fragen, ob das was MS vorgibt überhaupt das Beste ist.

Ein Beispiel:
Über die DataSet-Klasse gibt es z.B. tonnenweise Zeitschriftenartikel. Ein Designer dafür ist fest ins Visual Studio eingebaut. Ich würde das DataSet also als ziemlich "mainstream" bezeichnen. Trotzdem wird fast jeder mal so seine Schwierigkeiten damit gehabt haben.
ALT.NET ist jemand, der nach Möglichkeiten sucht, die Ziele ohne die Verwendung von DataSets effizient zu erreichen. (Es gibt natürlich auch Anwendungen, wo das DataSet das optimale Mittel ist.)"

 

Die deutschsprachige ALT.NET Community hat nun neben der Google Group auch eine eigene Webseite. Sie ist unter http://www.altdotnet.de zu erreichen.

The great guys from JetBrains finally released ReSharper 4.0. Congratulations for a great work the team has done.

If you are a C# developer and don't know ReSharper make sure to check it out. It will make your life so much easier.

We are currently working on the very first iteration of our healthcare application. The goal for this iteration is to provide some basic means of navigation and a dashboard-like screen.

I was responsible for the navigation part. It should consist of a list of patients to select from, a menu-like panel to invoke use cases and some other rather minor things. A rather great deal of work has to be done to develop a basic underlying application framework. That doesn't leave much time to tweak the user interface and create nice-looking navigation parts.

My co-worker's task is to create a screen that shows some summary information including a chart to display some health data.
Today he showed me a first draft of the screen. It showed a very pretty chart. With animated lines and gradient colors. A typical WPF chart.

It looked very cool. But I didn't think it was a good idea to include such modern control as part of the first iteration. While all other parts of the app look pretty basic and simple, the chart will draw much of the test users' attention.

But that is not what I want to achieve with the first and very basic iteration drop. The primary aim should be to get as many meaningful feedback as possible. But I'm afraid the test users will get distracted and won't deliver as much support as would be possible.
Don't get me wrong here. This is unconscious behavior. The chart control will catch every tester's eyes. This is not what I want to achieve.

So our strategy is to include a simpler version of the chart first and upgrade its appearance along with all other user interface parts. This way we can make sure that the testers don't focus too much on only one part.

Yes, finally I did it. I canceled my newsgroup subscription to the German Delphi newsgroups. There haven't been many discussions for a long time now that were of any interest to me.

I developed in Delphi for eigth years until I finally switched to the .NET platform and the C# camp two years ago. Since I worked at my new occupation I didn't write a single line of Delphi code. Nevertheless I still lurked the Delphi newsgroups. But now it's time to let go of Delphi.

So canceling the newsgroups subscriptions was a final step. So long, and thanks for all the fish!